Claude Giroux Snubbed, Not On Team Canada

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The Flyers will be sending five players to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi; Claude Giroux is not one of those players.

Team Canda was announced on Tuesday morning, and Giroux, the Flyers captain and best player, was not named to the team. It was considered a given by many that he would be on the team.

There are five Flyers who will be playing in the Olympics, Jakub Voracek (Czech Republic), Mark Streit (Switzerland), Michael Raffl (Austria), Kimmo Timonen (Finland), and Andrej Mazeros (Slovakia).

“Canadians take a lot of pride in hockey; it’s our first national sport and everybody that grows up in Canada and knows hockey wants to play hockey,” Giroux told the Times Herald on Monday. “If you have a chance to represent your country in your first sport. Maybe for Americans it would be baseball or football that would be No. 1. So I think it might mean a little bit more to Canadians.”

Giroux has 12 goals and 26 assists in 42 games for the Flyers this season.

Former Flyers coach Peter Laviolette called Giroux the “best player in the world” in 2012.